This topic is about PMC mission development which is basically campaigns and multiplayer missions.

I have been editing arma3 missions quite heavily already earlier 2018 so this is nothing new, just decided to start writing this stuff down today

2018-08-27 I started to play PMC Powder Bat campaign and soon after begin editing it to make changes according to my own todo list. After few edits I played some more and had a great time, this continued for several days. Huge amount of changes were made and they were committed to github arma3 PMC Campaigns.

When I got all basic issues sorted I added tanoa missions, then after more playtesting and edits I started to add the missions for altis which were missing since the campaign only covered small portion of the terrain.

Also I investigated how to make chapters to campaign description.ext and those "hub missions" known from bis east wind campaign, added three forward operating bases to altis, with ammo boxes savestatus, all which were hubs with patrol and defense missions. Creating the standard missions to cover whole altis actually was quite big task, it took me like 4 or so days straight, every day 16hrs a day editing to get them done. I was really satisfied to get them finally done.

Its been long time coming but now is time to get rid of that ugly sqs spaghetti as we call it. I must say I'm kind of ashamed that many of PMC missions still contain sqs from ofp era. The bulk of our sqs scripts are cutscene "movie.sqs" and not any game play critical scripts. I have been writing sqf scripts since arma1 so any sqs left in our missions is that ofp stuff.

There were about 1000 sqs scripts in my campaign/multiplayer missions dirs. On the first day of sqs porting I got roughly 350 scripts ported or sorted (I managed to just delete some as they were obsolete).

I'm really liking the mission editing in arma3 overall now, eden mission editor is pretty cool and I managed to run arma3 in PMC DevSurf machine (GTX 1060 3gb) with 4k resolution window mode. I'm using "standard" video options preset with all the useless fluff disabled or very low, arma3 runs decently, surprisingly good actually. Its very enjoyable to edit missions as compared to previously when I ran arma3 on 1080p window mode heh.

Hopefully more mission development posts can be made for this topic, it would be cool to read them years later.

Still 137 sqs scripts to port, although that list does include the bad offenders, Bagels Tour of Duty and Unscripted War which has been for years "un-portable" due the sheer sqs spaghetti size. Killswitch knows what I'm talking about

Then as a bonus I finished porting The Taxman by Ebud, that old great mission is finally in VTE fully ported to sqf!

I am very surprised that this project finished so soon, I was fully expecting on hammering these pesky sqs scripts for couple of weeks at least, heh great to have stuff done in no time

I wrote this down earlier as you can see from the dates, but "didn't have time" to post before now heh

2018-09-14

Did some work on Dynamic CE (CoC Command Engine) campaign, but unfortunately porting it would require more work than just making brand new campaign from just memories what the original was.

That SQS spaghetti is so bad with the gotos that nobody should have to endure such horror. Now that arma3 shows undefined variables, it was interesting to see how broken the original OFP version was heh.

But yeah quite bummed out that porting it wont be possible (well within reason at least). Going to end up just remaking most of the sqs spaghetti with todays tech and it definitely wont play exactly the same as in the good old days in OFP.

2018-09-15

Last night I overhauled Dynamic CE campaign, it wasnt working previously, now it is. Had to scrap the war and unit movement scripts as they were just way too old tech, replaced them with something new and still random generation. Now it just needs game play testing which of course takes its time, its a long mission campaign so there is no quick tests to be done.

Play tested PMC Powder Bat and noticed some flaws in it, started from a "campaign hub" Forward Operating Base and went onto a patrol in the nearby areas, well I could hardly see anyone, I played almost an hour and ran into two (2) groups even though I tried to visit some populated places. It was strange as the mission still had 150 bad guys in it, was thinking that yeah this needs like 500+ units with dynamic simulation

Ammo box fixes for the hub/FOB's, forgot to add them to all missions as there are so many (three hubs and three missions per hub). Also the players truck was missing on couple of them. Some of the hub missions had no defense units present due wrong gamelogic used, oops fixed heh.

Externalized all the saveStatus and loadStatus for ammo boxes so I dont have to edit millions of init.sqf files when doing changes for them, no changes can be seen in-game while playing but oh so much better editing setup now. Couple of hub's needed some ammo uniform box initialization to give more goodies for player to use.

Added kill counter for hub patrol missions which hopefully be nice to show progress or achievement for the player. Defense missions bumped the 50 bad guys to 100 as it was so easy to kill them off previously, I did it twice without breaking a sweat, just used M14 DMR from the guard tower and sniped the bugger eaters off, left hardly anything for the rest of my squad which was located in center of the FOB heh.

Overall did some work on the background scripts which wont show any change in-game. It was a good day of mission editing.

PMC Powder Bat is really growing (hell it already grew) to be a great campaign with the amount of missions and campaign hubs, the latest scripting tech etc. What I'm really hoping that kind of being worried, that I can have altis, stratis and tanoa terrains in the next game engine, because there is so much to play on this campaign that it would be a shame to leave it behind. But we have all the terrains in-game now since OFP so guess there is nothing to worry about the future, we'll get the terrains.

Today I added new empty ammo boxes for players use, totally empty so its up to player how he stores stuff in them. Adding them to all those altis missions was a real pain, so many missions so much copy pasting and aligning boxes to the ground hehe.

Placed two new ammo boxes to all three FOB missions which are using in about 30 missions, so 3 x 30 == 90 missions, uuh. I really need to externalize those FOB objects into scripts so I can tweak them in one location which then gets used in all of the missions, it is just crazy to edit so many missions which basically have duplicated objects in every mission.

Wanted to play test these new edits, well basically the altis chapter of this campaign today but ran out of time. I asked around in PMC discord if anyone wants to play test it but as usual nobody replied.